Four free tools every online start up should use

One of the most common reasons a start-up fails is due to a lack of money. With limited finding from your investors and no cash flow from previous years to fall back on, it can often be a tough job trying to run a business and ensure growth on a very tight budget. Luckily, for many new businesses there are a number of online tools that are available for free that you can use to help you run more efficiently. Here are four online tools that anyone setting up a business should be taking advantage of.

The Harvest

If you find that you are on the move quite a bit, it can be hard spending time working on actual projects. If you’re always from your desk for linger than you are at it, you don’t have to carry round a laptop to be productive. There are a number of apps that you can use on your mobile that can create, edit and send documents. You can create and manage charts using the speedymarks Charts app; create, view and share presentations with Keypoint; and export your PowerPoint slides to your iPhone using Mac Office 2008.

Google Analytics

If you’re starting a business these days, chances are you will have some sort of online presence. For a lot of company’s ranking high in the search engine results is their main driver of revenue. The easier you are to find, the more likely people are to visit your site and try your product/service. If you want to find out exactly who your visitors are and where they came from, this is perfect for you. You can look at the tiniest of details such as what device people visit your site using or whereabouts in the country they are. Knowing who your customers are and which visitors are most likely to convert is necessary for to achieve long-term stability.

Tweetdeck

TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter and Facebook accounts and while you may not currently be using either of these social networks for your business, it’s a great way to keep an eye on your competitors. Tweetdeck will be an invaluable tool for you. If you do decide to use social media as a form of advertising, you’ll find Tweetdeck is incredibly useful for engaging with your customers and monitoring what people are saying about your brand. When used efficiently, Tweetdeck is a great way to save time and money as you only have to set up relevant searches and lists once and you can continue to use them for your research.

MailChimp

There are currently hundreds of mailing solutions available for free but one that keeps popping up as the best is Mailchimp. It’s been praised for its ease of use which is perfect for first timers with little or no technical knowledge. You can build and manage all your different lists from one central interface and it is free to use until you start to hit certain thresholds that require a premium fee but even with that it is still worth it.

There are so many free tools around that it’s possible to start up a business with limited funding, you just need to know where to look!